•J 4 BOTANICAL GAZETTE. 



have come to the conclusion that botanists do not take as many notes 

 as we give them credit for doing, or that such notes as they do 

 "daily" make are not worth publishing in any kind of a paper, and if 

 they are buried they deserve to be. We are only afraid that if Mr. 

 Skaer confides too much in the resurrection of buried notes he will 

 find 1 6 pages hanging heavy on his hands. Too often does the sci- 

 entific editor, when the time to go to press comes to hand, find him- 

 self compelled to make something out of nothing, and his many sub- 

 scribers, with their many buried notes, sit quietly down and read the 

 result with no pangs of remorse. Any one sending 15 cents to Mr. 

 Henry Skaer, Room 34, N. W. Cor. 3d and Pine Sts., St. Louis, 

 Mo., can obtain No. i of the Valley Natumliat, and can judge for 

 himself whether he wishes to continue it. 



Mr. E. S. Miller, of Wading River, N. Y., sends out for 1880 

 an attractive catalogue of North American Orchids, Bulbs, Aquatics, 

 Ferns, etc. The promise is made that any North American i)lants, 

 not in the catalogue, will be procured if appplication for them is made 

 in suitable season. The list as given contains 56 Orchids, 76 Ferns, 

 54 Aquatic plants, 76 Bulbs, 28 Shrubs, and 193 Herbaceous Plants. 



Dr. Otto Kuntze, of Leipzig, has recently published a work in 

 which he seems to take some very advanced views and proposes some 

 very radical changes. He considers that recent investigations, such 

 as those of Darwin, have destroyed the old idea of species, but that 

 we still hold to it in systematic botany. He makes strong objection 

 to the pract ce of taking some form as the type of a species and thus 

 seeming to acknowledge species as a fixed rather than a relative thing. 

 To follow nature correctly he contends that every form should be de- 

 scribed and arranged in proper relationships, and thus the true gene- 

 alogy might be made out. Dr. Kuntze illustrates his methods by ap- 

 plying them to the simple-leaved forms of the genus Riibits, a most 

 perplexing one to Old World botanists. Thus, if we catch the idea, 

 under this genus Riihits, we would have no specific names, but 

 simply terms applying to certain classes of forms. Not so very 

 simply, either, as the following proposed names will show. Under 

 simple-leaved Rtibi are first, Finifonnes and Gregiformes. The latter 

 are again divided into Locofonncs, Typiformes, Vcrsifonnes, Ranii- 

 formes, Avofonnes, Mediofonnes, Mistoformes, Singiilifon/ics, etc. 

 Rather than use such terms in place of our simple specific names we 

 think that botanists will choose to continue to seem to contradict na- 

 ture for the sake of convenience. We can still say Rulnts Canadensis 

 with the mental reservation at the same time that we know there is no 

 such thing, just as we speak of the flow of a current of electricity, 

 although we know that electricity is no fluid. Nor do we sec why 

 the pro])osed change should not be applied to genera as well as to 

 species. Another change Dr. Kuntze proposes is to use arbitrary 

 signs in place of language in botanical descriptions. Imagine the de- 

 scriptive phrase, "Sepals 2, ovate, free, persistent. Stamens 5, ad- 

 hering to the short claws of the petals" made to look someting like 

 this — "S.^ X oz^Aj X X y P." When a botanical description gets to 



